


blue hours

by treatpeople



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: 1980s, Actor Harry, Artists, Drug Abuse, M/M, Minor Zayn Malik/Liam Payne, New York City, Past Character Death, Period-Typical Homophobia, Recreational Drug Use, Religious Conflict, Smoking, harry is in love with the sea, i cant think of anything else but let me know, like just too much lol, louis glassblows, there is mentioned self harm of a minor character
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-03
Updated: 2019-10-03
Packaged: 2020-11-23 01:27:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20883893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/treatpeople/pseuds/treatpeople
Summary: 'The sky is becoming dark and all Louis’ sculptures are lit by moonbeams. His flesh and bone become one and the same. A jellyfish and internal organs look so similar, and Harry sees bodies underwater.'1980's New York City. Harry and Louis find each other.





	blue hours

**Author's Note:**

> hi! this is my first properly published fic after 7 years of reading h/l. it is still not finished but i feel like splitting it into chapters might motivate me to complete it. 
> 
> im sorry if it comes across as self indulgent... i just hope that someone somewhere likes it. i took a lot of inspiration from patti smith's novel just kids, and the title comes from midnight 01 (deep sea diver) by king krule. also; the play harry stars in is called ‘prodigal son’ and it was originally performed in 2016. it didn’t exist in 1981 so apologies if that's real annoying to u lol.
> 
> my most important note is in regards to the setting of this story, as in the 1980's nyc was in the midst of the aids crisis and it's horrific impact on lgbt people & people of colour. i didnt want to whitewash that history but in the end, i decided that a fanfiction by someone who has no experience aids or hiv is nowhere near the right place to represent the topic... i hope that others agree.
> 
> finally i am seventeen and have never lived in america so pls tell me if anything is too wrong. :(
> 
> im henri && my tumblr is [treatpeople](http://treatpeople.tumblr.com), & here is the [fic post](https://treatpeople.tumblr.com/post/188114988941/blue-hours-by-treatpeople-the-sky-is-becoming). also [ here](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/76jRWInIwNcKZeZyaARmPW?si=IzD4OG0WQYumcs_MoSUmNw) is the playlist which i would strongly recommend listening to :-)
> 
> thank you..!

Early memories of the storms come back to him often. In dreams or in fleeting moments, times when the smell of salt or the creaking of a house tugs on some dormant part of his brain. The feeling of those childhood winds is always there, in the stone in his stomach or the creaking of a settling house, but sometimes the imagery is especially vivid. He can’t remember which memory is the earliest. The images swim together, too similar to break apart. It often feels as though his childhood was one long cycle of storms. 

They slid over the mountains sleek and slow. Harry would wake far earlier than the rest of the house, sticking his sockless feet into cold rubber boots and going out into the garden, holding his hands out to the morning air. He would know if a storm was coming from the way the chill spread brittle and harsh over his fingers. As the white sun rose behind the mountains, the clouds would let loose their heavy bellies and rain would soak the sodden soil. Harry’s mother used to fret as she woke to drops on the window, rushing out to the clothes line to remove billowing sheets of blue and white, now damp to the touch. Later, his parents sipped instant coffee from broken mugs, the kitchen radio droning on in the background. The sheets hung heavy in the bathroom.

Following that first rain was always the rolling fog, a soft, clinging cloud, sliding down from the mountains like a great snake, turning the world flat and white. Harry stared out his bedroom window into the nothingness, or, if he managed to sneak past his mother’s gaze, he would run through the garden, lying beneath that midwestern sky, breathing in the frost. The morning’s rain soaked through his cotton pyjamas as he watched snails crawl across pieces of wood. They were so innocent, unaware of what was to come, and yet so well prepared. 

Clouds of dark built throughout the day, the sky pregnant with anticipation, condensation fogging up the windows of every room. Harry and his sister would drag the box out from the cupboard and retrieve every candle they could, filling rooms with them. The smell of metal became tangible as dusk fell; cobwebs and shadowy crannies, silence, a shifting limb and lungs full of dust. They played hide and seek on storm days, as the apprehension heightened everything, flickering electric in their bones. Harry remembers being curled up in a thick bedroom chest, a sliver of light peeking through the gap of the lid, his heart thudding both at the thought of being found and the thought of being lost. With his knees pressed against the great, aged wood, and something square and hard pressing against his hip, he would listen to the thunder rumble their town. 

They always stopped playing once the power cut off and the house became lit by candle flame. It was a strange, eerie way to see, his father’s face edged in an orange glow, flickering and painting strange shadows on the walls of their house. They ate dinner surrounded by melted wax, his parents drank wine. He went to sleep lulled by the sound of rain on the roof and shaking, creaking, wailing walls.

Days after the torrents of rain and the howling winds and the thunder and lightning, some small peace would settle - pale blue sky and raindrops gentle against his window pane. He and Gemma would get dressed and take to the streets, tasting the petrichor and fresh new day, noting the damage the storm had caused. Brown water pooled around their feet, and they unclogged the gutters that had filled with plant debris, watching as the streets drained dry around them. Harry now, the adult-Harry, the Harry who tried valiantly to grow into his limbs and his hair and his eyes - that Harry can still taste the electricity in the air. He can smell the salt, swept down from mountain rock or faraway ocean. 

Despite the frequency of the storms, Harry’s always felt there’s something about them that he could never capture. Even now, far away from his childhood home, that frantic weather creeps into his subconscious. His dreams are filled with water. He tries not to let it overspill.

-

**October 13th, 1981.**

Blue static fills the room in a gloomy fizz. 

Harry’s got a cigarette with a two inch ash, and the sounds of traffic outside his window never stop. Smoke slips through his fingers. It looks, in the lowlight, like the heat waves that rise from tarmac in the summer, when everything is treacle slow and slick. He tilts his head back. Lets his eyes flutter closed. Where his forearm rests on the armchair, it sticks, and sweat beads at his temples. It’s October, and it feels like the middle of June. 

New York is a beast. 

Harry snubs his cigarette on the leather seat and stands up, lighting another as he moves to the window. Outside, the streets are dusk blue and buzzing, and he watches as car after car passes under orange streetlights. The moisture is humid, cloying, the wrong type of wet. He rests his elbows on the windowsill, leans half out, closes his eyes against the air. Two people in jeans walk directly beneath him, denim trailing on the dirty street. They talk and Harry hears traces of their conversation. 

The end of his cigarette glows amber as he takes a long, deep inhale. Smoke scratches at the insides of his lungs. The sunset had been nice, drowning the apartment, but now he feels emptied of everything at once. The glow of his box of a television is giving everything an ethereal edge. He’s teetering on the line of lucidity. 

The city is so huge and Harry knows so many people, but he feels stupidly alone. 

He is beginning to feel as though he’s only real when he’s acting, because that’s the only time he has any purpose to what he’s doing. All other times, he can’t stop thinking about how he’s presenting and what he’s doing and the fact that every second of the day he must be making decisions. Moving and having something to say, all of it. He wishes he were a fish, with clear intention, clear design, and necessary movement. All he’d have to do is swim and eat and swim.

Harry squints and the street turns blurry. He has a vision of the city overcome by ocean. Sea froth spits at his face, makes his skin salty. A tsunami, if it were fast, might not be so bad. He pictures himself one moment at the laundromat, heaping clothes into a washing machine, and the next taken by a powerful beast. Swirling like the clothes caught in water. 

Another cigarette is down by the time he steps away from the window. He walks back to the coffee table on weak legs, settling down in front of it, legs crossed and his elbows on his knees.

_Siphonophores_.

The book is already open. 

_Siphonophores are eternal and bioluminescent and they clone themselves over and over again. Some get to be longer than a blue whale_.

Harry closes his eyes. A vast black ocean, endless, empty, and then the floating, cloning, translucent, entirely beautiful connection of bodies. 

_Among the stinging cells are stalks with red glowing ends. The tips twitch back and forth, creating a twinkling effect. Twinkling red lights are thought to attract the small fish eaten by these siphonophores_.

Harry rests his head on the wooden table. His hair curls around his jaw, tickles his own throat. He imagines that he is weightless, limbless. Floating. He imagines he is nothing but a bioluminescent piece of string longer than a blue fucking whale.

-

When he wakes up hours later, the twinge in his neck is sudden and painful. His hair is matted to his forehead, all coiled with sweat and sleep, and he feels too big for his own body. The television remains as it was, fuzzing with no connection. His knees click as he pushes back from the table, stretches. It seems he has no control over his own body these days. He lies awake in bed for hours upon hours, eyes closed, hands fisting in the sheets, stomach turning and legs itching. Yet, his head touches a table and he’s instantly dreaming. 

Harry touches his fingers to the plate of the siphonophore in his book, tracing it’s tendrils. Outside the sky is light, and he can feel the hint of tangerine sunrise peeking out over the horizon. The apartment smells like stale smoke and coffee grounds. 

His clothes are in a small pile by his mattress, and he sorts through them for a t-shirt to tuck into his brown cords. It’s still so warm, the apartment dripping tepid, and Harry can feel his curls tightening at the nape of his neck. When he’s dressed, he takes about two steps across the box of his apartment and opens the door, stepping out into the concrete corridor and closing it behind him. He leaves the television buzzing. 

Sweat slides down his temple as he makes his way down the steps of the apartment complex. The walls are tagged and sprayed, bright oranges and greens that swim in front of Harry’s hazy gaze. His converse are worn down thin and he can feel the sickly cold of the concrete with each step he takes. Descending, descending, descending. Never deep enough.

Harry is watching his feet as he reaches the bottom of the steps, pushes the door open, and walks right into a figure hunched over the recycling bins. 

“Oh,” is all he says, taking a step back as the stranger straightens up, turning to face Harry against the backdrop of pre-dawn. He looks incredibly caught out. It’s hard to make him out in such low light, but the glow of moon lights up two green bottles in his hands. 

There’s a pregnant silence in which Harry feels the concrete around him bend and warp in the heat.

“Excuse me,” he says, when the stranger doesn’t make any attempt to move or speak. His own voice is so slow, one beat per minute. Talking feels like dredging a stick from a clump of seaweed. 

“Right, yeah,” the man says. He doesn’t move. He’s got a layer of stubble over his jaw. There’s another pause. “Sorry.” 

Harry blinks. His gaze slides back down to the bottles in the man’ hands, empty and cool. The light is turning properly orange, now, a shade of honeysuckle that gives everything a fuzzy yellow border. Harry feels trapped, a bug in amber. The moment has encapsulated itself and it appears that no one is ever going to be able to move on. 

Then, in a moment, the amber cracks. The man steps off the stoop and lets Harry move past, converse tapping quiet on the concrete. He carries on down the sidewalk, holding the back of his hand to his warm cheek. Something about the brief interaction has his skin itching, that same electrical charge he feels before storms, metallic and apprehensive. It’s not that he cares; it’s none of his business what anyone does with their mornings or his glass. It’s just a subconscious feeling. One that settles in his ribcage and rattles as he walks. 

Above him, peach settles over the city like a mist. Two kids shoot by on bicycles, laces untied and arms stretched wide. It’s still warm, but there’s a wind to the city now, drying the sweat on his nape and turning his knuckles red. The image of those two bottles in that man’s hands sits in his head. Deep green. He imagines shrinking himself down and climbing inside one, lying curled up inside the dry glass. Surrounded by oceanic vastness, like those ships-in-a-bottle his uncle used to make. 

The idea of capturing something in stasis feels important to him. Time is slippery, a fish on deck, writhing and gasping in the dryness. His childhood exists only in his own head. There’s not even any proof that it happened, that only the precise, current moment of consciousness isn’t the only reality. Maybe none of those memories are real. He despises the way in which his growth comes from experiences he isn’t even aware of anymore. His acting is pathetic attempts at bottling his feelings, trying to close a fist around the atmosphere of a day. All he wants is to preserve something, for once, for longer than a few moments. 

No matter how many storms he’s lived through, they always dissipate, broken through by a nervous sun, and Harry will never be able to articulate, not with any medium, the way they make him feel. 

-

Hendrix is spinning on the turntable when he arrives at Zayn’s apartment, door unlocked as it always is, walls too thin here to bother. The complex is even cheaper than Harry’s, and Zayn still shares it with Liam. 

_Let it drain your worries away. Lay back and groove on a rainy day_.

Harry floats inside on Hendrix’s guitar and the smell of weed. Zayn’s lying on his mattress with his shirt off, black and white oil paint staining his hands, smoke rising from the abandoned joint on the floor. He lifts his head as Harry comes in and closes the door behind him, shoes squeaking on the old floorboards. Turpentine fumes circulate around Harry’s head as he picks his way through abandoned paper, coming to a stop next to Zayn and sitting beside him. He leans back against the wall, forearms resting on his knees. The window above the mattress is cracked open and takes up the better part of the wall, allowing in the morning sounds of car horns and voices. New York seems gentle, sometimes, tinted young and tangerine. This is another example of a feeling impossible to capture - the city, usually coarse and rushing and burnt, melting under a simple sunrise. 

“Hey there, sunshine,” Zayn smiles, watching as Harry picks up the joint and inhales. 

“It’s too hot,” he grumbles in response, breathing out a cloud, his cheeks flushed. 

“It’s nice. I like this.” Zayn sits up and turns to lean against the windowsill, dangling one arm out into the city. Harry tugs on his bottom lip, watching the playing card tattoo on Zayn’s ribs stretch out. “Have you seen William recently?” 

Harry turns his head, forearms resting on his knees. Sheets of paper cover the ground, all Zayn’s writing and pencil marks, and layered against the walls are endless canvases. Zayn mostly paints in grey. Black and white tubes are cheaper than dealing with colour.

“Nah. Haven’t been out much this week.” 

“Mm. Seems no one’s seen him.” Zayn turns to blink at Harry, his lashes long over his eyes. His hair is damp, either with sweat or shower-water, and it’s curls over his brow. Side A of the record finishes with the snick of a needle but neither of them get up to switch it, slowed by the syrup morning. 

“Things happen,” Harry replies slowly, sliding down the wall until he’s lying flat on the floor. The joint burns out.

Zayn shifts audibly. “Something you know of?” he murmurs. 

“No.”

It’s quiet for a bit, and then the mattress creaks as Zayn stands up in the warm light. He’s wearing only briefs, ridden up his thighs, revealing downy hair and more tattoos. Harry watches the sun glow on his brown skin. A moth flaps meekly by his foot, trapped inside since allured by the nighttime glow of electricity. 

Zayn walks over to the fridge and takes out a beer can. He cracks it open and drinks half, a hand still holding the door, painting his body in white light. 

Another moment. 

Harry spends so much of every day wishing he could make things permanent that he hardly remembers how to appreciate what’s real. 

Zayn comes back to Harry, with his beer, and leans sideways against the wall, gaze lingering on Liam’s desk on the other side of the room. “Maddie’s going out tonight and you’re coming,” he says after a moment.

Harry sighs, wipes the sticky sweat from his under eyes. The floor beneath his head is wooden and hard.

“At hers?” 

“No. Studio 28.” 

He chews on the inside of his cheek, hands clasped over his stomach. He likes to go out. When he’d first arrived in New York, it was all he ever did, chasing the freedom and the drop in his stomach and the feeling of men’s hands, touching him gently, wanting. He spent his nights surrounded by sweat and spit, the rub of skin against skin. During his first week, a man pierced his right ear in the sauna of a bathhouse. He had flaunted the tiny gold earring like a child with a brand new toy. 

The past two weeks have made him into a shadow. 

“Alright,” Harry replies, and he feels Zayn’s smile.

The morning becomes yellow and stretched and they lie in a daze, covering their hands in paint and fucking up one of Zayn’s canvases, resisting the urge to spray the walls. Zayn scrawls some strange face right onto the back of Harry’s t-shirt, white paint bleeding through to the other side and cooling his skin. Motorcyclists and children and junkies exist in their own universes outside the window, and New York City breathes with all the energy and desolation of a new decade. 

-

Sunset comes and goes in a matter of minutes, the sky burning from red to black as Zayn and Harry get ready. They spill turpentine over their hands to clean themselves of paint, scrubbing their knuckles red raw, watching the oils slide down the sink. 

Half of Harry’s clothes are in Zayn’s apartment already and they dress each other in a mish-mash of each other’s wardrobes, fishing rings and necklaces out from underneath the mattress, tugging on each other’s sleeves. Harry dons his leopard print coat, the lining entirely fucked with rips. He finds a twenty dollar bill and someone’s lip gloss in the pocket, and they celebrate by applying the gloss and using the money to buy a shitty bottle of vodka on the way to 28. They get the neck all sticky with shimmer, and the cherry flavour blends with the alcohol burn in a way that’s almost sickly. Harry shoves it in his coat pocket when they reach the building, and they’re ushered inside as familiar faces. 

Inside the atmosphere is hot and heavy. Vodka slides down his throat, getting him sloppy within minutes. Zayn manages to find Madeline in a booth with a huge group of people Harry vaguely knows, and there’s barely enough room for them to squeeze onto the end, smoke and pink lights turning everything to a haze. He fades out as everyone around him moves and talks, watching the lights and the dancing. Is this what the deep ocean would look like, if all those shining creatures bunched together in one packed little section? Maybe that’s what happens, he thinks, and it’s unknown to us land creatures, us lumbering mammals with flimsy cameras and massive submarines.

Maddie tries to talk to Harry from across the table, and Alexa and her friends linger by him for a moment, but he feels on a plane separate from everyone else. It seems like everything around him is happening in slow motion, and so he can’t focus on speech at all. He presses a kiss to Zayn’s cheek - leaving a shimmer on his skin - and then stands from the booth, taking the vodka bottle from his coat and drinking in a way that has alcohol spilling down his jaw. 

He pushes himself into the crowd and is jostled by bodies, his breath coming out hot and wet. The bottle is a cold, grounding piece of glass in his fist, sloshing over onto his fingers as he moves. There’s hands all over the place; he wishes he was wearing less. 

Clouded in salt and sweat, Harry makes his way out the other side and keeps going until he reaches the back door of the pub. He opens it and tumbles out into the alley, taking a searing sip of vodka as the nighttime air presses at his temples. The dip in temperature has his stomach muscles seizing, flimsy mesh proving unsuitable for alleyways.

It’s only as he leans back against the wall that he realises someone else is standing there with him.

It’s a man. Cigarette in his mouth, stubble, leather jacket, cheekbones. He stands directly across from Harry, his expression that of vague amusement, and his wrist bent delicately as he removes the cigarette and exhales. 

“Please don’t throw up at my feet,” he drawls, and it’s as he’s speaking that Harry realises they’ve crossed paths before.

“I’m barely even drunk,” he replies, unaware if it’s true or not, smoothing his thumb over the open top of the bottle. “Do you often hang out in alleyways?”

The man raises an eyebrow, smoking winding from between his fingers. “I’m a ghost. Confined here for the rest of my life.”

In this moonlight, Harry can see the black eyeliner smudged across the man’s lids. Ghosts don’t wear eyeliner. 

“Have some,” he says, holding his drink out, until the man drops his cigarette and obliges. Harry hands him the bottle of vodka. He drinks, pulls back with a frown, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.

“What’s that fruity taste?” 

Harry smiles. Pulls on his bottom lip. “Cherry bomb.” 

The man raises his eyebrows, mouth quirking into a quick smile. “Ah. Of course.” 

They fall into silence and the bassline from inside the club pulls at Harry’s chest. It’s hard to talk to someone without the safety of a routine situation, and nothing seems worth saying. The usual /you’re pretty, take your shirt off, what do you drink/, the press of skin, all of this is worthless here, and Harry’s hands feel clammy. He feels fifteen, standing on the school field in too short shorts while his classmates run circles around him. 

He looks at the ground. Glass lies at their feet in shards.

“What were you doing this morning?” Harry asks quietly, knuckles white around the bottle. Midnight air shimmers cool against his skin. He hears the man’s slow exhale, feels him shift against the brick wall. 

“I make things out of glass,” he explains, and Harry looks up, his stomach flipping with interest. “Cheaper to take people’s abandoned shit. To reuse it.” 

“Like sculpture?”

The man nods. “Mm. Like sculpture.” 

“Oh.” Pause. “My name is Harry.” 

That same amused expression. It’s unsettling, because Harry can’t work out what it means. Anything is preferable - desire, disgust, he doesn’t care. As long as he knows. 

“Louis,” the man says, and rubs at his jaw. Looks at Harry out of the corner of his eye. “You’re into that, then? Sculpture and shit.” 

“I’m into a lot of things.” 

Louis takes a silver lighter from his pocket and flicks the lid open and closed, a gentle snick beneath the rolling waves of club sound. “Tell me about them.” 

Vodka floods Harry’s insides out of nowhere, drunkenness licking at his stomach like a gentle dog. He thinks about what he likes and it’s men, drinking, acting, the smell of paint. 

“I like the ocean.” 

“Scary place,” Louis smiles.

Harry rolls his eyes, and he’s smiling too. “People just don’t know enough about it.”

“Tell me, then.” 

“Um.” Harry rubs the fabric of his coat between two fingers, concentrating despite the slurry of alcohol in his brain. “My most favourite thing is Venus’ flower basket.” 

“Go on,” Louis says, voice low with smoke and gentle. He shifts his position against the wall and watches Harry. Harry’s usual affinity for being observed can’t be found. 

“It’s a glass sponge,” Harry begins, “of woven fibers.” His voice is too rough. “It’s found only in the deep ocean, where everything is deafeningly black, and so it’s bioluminescent. Emits its own light. They’re beautiful. But what’s even more beautiful is that shrimp live inside of them. Their parents breed, and while the babies are still tiny they escape through the holes of the sponge, and go to find their own. A mated pair of shrimp stay in there and grow too big to ever leave. Trapped inside the network of fibres. It’s like this relationship, with each other but also with the sponge, because the shrimp clean the tissues and in return, it releases waste for the shrimp to eat.” 

Harry pauses, glances up to look at Louis. He’s got his head leaned against the wall and he’s just breathing smoke. The stubble on his jaw and upper lip is catching the yellow light of the streetlamps. 

“The shrimp have babies and the babies escape, that same cycle, but the original shrimp die in their baskets. Can’t ever leave once they grow,” Harry explains. He curls his fingers in his pockets. “In Japan, dead Venus’ flower baskets are given as wedding gifts. They symbolise the phrase - till death do us part.” 

Louis licks his lips and there’s a long period of nothing where the silence hangs between them like something solid. 

“I’d like to see what those sponges look like.”

Harry nods, hair falling in his eyes. “I have books.” 

The world seems tired and drowsy as Louis replies, gentle, “show me one day,” and Aphrodite’s pearls turn the moonlight pink.

The door slams open. 

A drunk couple stumbles out of the club. Harry recognises the girl because of her blue eyeshadow. He and Louis make eye contact as the others move and make sound, altering the environment, having no idea what they’re doing. The two of them half fall into the wall. They’re swimming in drugs and barely registering the company. Louis takes a deep breath, smiles at Harry, and then straightens up. His gaze is almost apologetic.

“I’ll see you, Harry,” he says. It’s something serious. His words are weighted. Harry just blinks back at him.

He watches as Louis slips his hands into his pockets and walks off down the alleyway, turning into a silhouette. Harry can only just see his shape turn onto the street and disappear from view.

-

Harry wakes up the next morning in his own apartment. 

He’s wearing trousers but no shirt, and his head is pounding, blurring his vision. The window is open and he can hear cars on the street. His sheets are bunched underneath his back, tugged out from underneath the mattress, and his duvet is nowhere to be seen. All he wants is to curl into a ball and sleep, but the day won’t stop dragging on for him, and he will be carried out by the rip. 

Cold air clings to the apartment as he pushes himself up to sit, blinking blearily at the weakness of his stomach. It isn’t the worst hangover ever. He left after Louis did, contained in his own small bubble, floating home on a separate plane. It’s him that Harry thinks about now, unbuttoning his jeans and standing up, making his way to the little bathroom. 

He stands under a cold shower and watches his hair turn straight with water. His fingers go almost blue at the tips, and he keeps moving them once he’s out, squeezing his toothbrush to keep the blood going. He drinks as much tap water as he can before his stomach starts to hurt, but he can’t find any painkillers. He dresses in all black and removes his rings. He thinks about Louis’ stubble and hands and the way he listened. He thinks about how he was searching through Harry’s recycling for abandoned glass. He thinks about jellyfish and their silver sheen. He thinks about his rehearsals today, the shift from solitary blue to the startling yellow of acting, a stage and somebody else. 

Leaning outside of the window, Harry smokes another cigarette. A voyeuristic morning routine. 

Today he can’t focus on anyone, but watches their bodies move, traffic and bikes blurring together alongside the slow lope of pedestrians. When William would stay over, sometimes he’d still be there in the mornings, and they’d look out onto the street together, not saying a word. They never spoke in the mornings. The delicacy of eggshell blue, breaking sky, the intimacy of spending longer than a few hours together. The implications. 

The ghost of coffee tastes strong on Harry’s tongue. He drops his cigarette out of the window, finds his shoes, finds his keys, and leaves.

-

The days that follow pass in acting, and crying as someone else, and laughing as someone else, using hand gestures and spitting and hurting. His hair flies wild as he pulls at the tie around his neck. Older men surround him. It’s the mirror image of his nights of debauchery, except everything is fictional and no one is hard.

Rehearsing takes Harry’s life from him, and he ends up wrung out and sweaty, lying on Zayn’s floor in his underwear or drinking beer with him in the park. Liam reads poetry out loud … _the hour between dog and wolf, that is, dusk_ … and clouds hug the city in a clumsy embrace. Harry has strange dreams of underwater and aquariums. He can feel Zayn trying not to ask about William, and he can feel himself trying not to think about Louis. It feels strangely like cheating, like a sordid affair, despite the absence of anything sordid having happened between the two of them. He wants to collect all his glass and leave it spread throughout the streets. He wants to tuck notes into every bottle he throws out. 

“I need to start waiting again,” Harry murmurs, the morning of the play’s opening, while Liam does something with vegetables in the kitchen and Zayn looks through his records. 

“Waiting for what?”

“Waiting. At a fucking restaurant.”

“Don’t start being sharp. I hate when you hang around actors for too long,” Zayn replies, distractedly. He slides /Unknown Pleasures/ out of its sleeve and places it on the turntable, lowering the needle with unnecessary care. Harry flops onto his back, closing his eyes as the riff starts drumming into his temples. The volume is at almost maximum, and for a moment he doesn’t even feel real, floating above the floorboards. He can see himself - his chest and stomach are connected to the sky with strings, his body arching and his limbs hanging loose. _Could these sensations make me feel the pleasures of a normal man?_

There are several burnt out joints on the windowsill. 

“You’re a painter, which is a thousand times worse,” he murmurs, although it could’ve been hours since Zayn last spoke. “Anyway, after this show I’ll be out of an income.”

“This is a big one though, yeah? Decent amount, I thought.” 

Harry rolls over, face pressed into the mattress. “Decent amount for acting,” he says, indecipherable beneath the music. A lump appears in his throat beyond reasoning, thick and clogging when he tries to swallow. He’s not even thinking about anything, it’s just melodrama. 

Outside, lightning snaps and thunder rumbles. 

It’s been a mild day for October, long clouds but an orange sunrise, and the sudden descent of storm surprises them all. The strings holding Harry to the sky get tight. Rain starts hitting against the open window, and Zayn moves to close it, careful of his rumpled bed sheets. 

“Fucking insane weather,” he mutters, shivering a little in his sweater. Joy Division fills the apartment. Harry feels like a ballerina in a box, winding up, ready to perform. He’s in the opposite of a snow-globe. 

“I miss summer,” Liam announces, carefully slicing garlic. “New York summer is classic.”

Harry is on another plane. He’s not sure if he smoked too much or if it’s the threat of the play, the absence of William, the mere idea of Louis. These three axes have become his mental obsession and as he lies there with drums shaking his ribs he crawls between them, a spider in a web of his own making. “I think I have the heart of a child,” he says, rolling onto his back, but he’s too quiet, or maybe he doesn’t even say it out loud. 

Thoughts of Genet flit through his mind - a thief, a poet. Paris. He wants to go to Paris. He wants to run away. He wants to steal and be an enemy of the law. He is an enemy of the law by existing. He doesn’t want to get sick.

When Zayn is about to say something important, he clears his throat and breathes slower. Harry can feel the sentence coming seconds before it’s said - “no one’s seen William in days.” 

“How tragic,” Harry drawls. His mouth feels clumsy and big. 

“What happened?” Zayn asks, gently.

“Bit presumptuous.” It takes him eons to get the word out. 

“Harry, he’s quit his job. And no one can find him at Lispenard. What the fuck happened?” 

“How would I know.” 

“Because, you’re - you’re.” Zayn breaks off and lets out a frustrated sound. Harry’s palms feel clammy and the rain seems very loud on the window pane. Liam is busying himself with something in the bathroom; he always removes himself from conflict. 

“I’m not anything.” (Anymore.) 

“You drive me insane sometimes.”

“Cool.” 

“I wish you wouldn’t close off so much.”

“I’m an Aquarius,” Harry replies, waving his hand in the air and closing his eyes. Thunder claps over Ian Curtis’ voice. 

“Fucking hilarious,” Zayn murmurs. “Find a boyfriend to open you up.”

“They don’t need to be my boyfriend to open me up,” Harry replies, smiling now, as Zayn hits himself in the head. 

“I did make that easy for you,” he sighs, pushing all his records to the side. “Whatever, then. Opening night, so I have to be nice, anyway.”

“Exactly,” Harry huffs. 

“Ten minutes until you have to leave, actually,” Liam pipes up as he returns to the kitchen bar. 

“Thank you, father.” 

“You’re welcome.”

The rain comes down gentle. 

Ten minutes later, Harry is walking to the theatre with shaking hands. He’s dressed already in his outfit, a shirt and slacks, work shoes big on his feet. He closes his eyes and feels very alone.

He’s not embarrassing enough to be properly anxious about this, except he is, and he doesn’t want to throw up on the side of the road. Everything is known to him - once he is acting, he will feel fine, and once he is there, everyone will be nervous, and once it’s over, he will not remember it. But this knowledge doesn’t help. The pavement is cold and the sky spits on his head.

When he arrives, it’s into a rush of movement. The air is deep red and passionate, excited, anxious. Harry wraps his arms around his stomach and stands as if stranded.

“Harry!” Claudia comes storming over to him from behind the props. She has short, dark hair, slicked behind her ears, and her eyes are wild. “Don’t look like that. You’ll throw everyone else off.” 

“I’m not looking like anything,” he tries to protest, but she is barely listening. Claudia is only a year older than him, and she can hold a room’s attention without effort. 

“We need to go over the lighting. You’ve held us up.” 

Harry is actually earlier than he was instructed to be, but this is irrelevant. 

Backstage is all wooden floorboards and ripped up carpet. Racks of costumes line the walls and actors are rehearsing, buzzed up on energy, drinking endless bottles of water. Harry believes that Tom has already done a line in the bathroom, and it’s not even afternoon yet. So is the way of New York and stupid actors. Most of the other actors, in fact, are older, and some treat him like a child. Harry doesn’t know if it’s method or if they just don’t like him. 

Sean in particular pays him no attention. A fifty year old man with his shirt cuffs haphazard and his hair grey. He moves about drinking water and demanding more, and performs a series of meditative rituals before practicing each scene. Harry wonders about himself at fifty, and realises that he has never thought that far ahead. Don’t worry, Sean, he wants to say, you have no need to resent me. I will never be great. 

Harry seems to have no control over his body as he is ushered onto the stage where he stands under a bright yellow and moving cascade of lights. The seats splay out in front of him. He imagines them populated with little bobbing heads, and big eyes. Right at the front, he sees the image of his mother, dark hair and green eyes. He wonders if she’ll ever again see him act. Maybe she’ll hear his name on the radio, or read it in the culture section of the newspaper.

As if he’ll ever get past the airwaves of New York City, all the way back to drizzling Michigan.

-

“_Everybody talks to me like I’m the one, you know, I should change. Why should I change? I’ve never even got to find out who I am; you want me to change, that’s crazy._”

Harry’s voice breaks, his eyes feel hot with tears, they are looking at only him. He feels feral with the lines and light. This could be underwater for a fish. This is when he is moving and showing off, twisting like he can, each scale shimmering colour. Each gesture of his hand is easy and designed, natural as the rain outside. The audience is huger than ever and yet he is aware of no one - the actors around him wax and wane, more real than they’ve ever been. Theatre rats no more; it’s all so very genuine. When the audience laughs, it almost surprises him, and then it gives him joy, and then he gets cheekier. 

He crosses his wrists over each other, grips the back of his seat. His cheeks colour pink with all the feeling.

The first night is a success, and so is the second, and so is the third. He goes out for drinks with everyone after every show, and they’re swarming with excitement and energy. Intoxication adds to the chaos of their insides, amping them up, making them dehydrated and antsy the next day. Then they release it all on stage.

On the evening of the final night, Tom takes Harry aside. His hand is gentle on Harry’s forearm as he leads him, with gentle conviction, away from the huddle of prepping actors. Harry doesn’t know where they’re going but he follows as he always does, letting his body bow and break into whatever is asked of him. 

They crowd into the men’s backstage bathroom in their shirts and ties. Tom slips his hand into his pocket and pulls out two small pills, smiling wryly. “Molly. Do you want to?” 

Harry swallows and his throat bobs. Tom isn’t gay, or at least he’s said he’s had girlfriends, but right now he seems to be staring at Harry’s mouth, and holding himself as if he’s too self aware. It’s probably that he’s already taken God knows what, and for the first time since Harry’s observed Tom’s behaviours he starts to get a little anxious. He can’t lose himself onstage. 

“I don’t know,” Harry says, quiet.

“It’s the last night,” Tom murmurs, his clean shaven jaw tensing. “It’ll make it feel sweet.”

“It feels sweet already.”

“Sweeter, Harry. C’mon. When we’re onstage together, we’ll know.”

Harry lets out a little laugh. “You’re out of your mind.”

Tom smiles again and takes Harry’s hand, moving his fingers open and placing the tab in his palm. 

Harry gives in. 

A moment after he’s swallowed it, they hear footsteps coming down the hall. They exit the bathroom just as Claudia rounds the corner, looking severe, and promptly shoves them in the direction of the wings.

“Fucking always goes loses all structure on the last night,” she mutters under her breath, and then louder, “perform well tonight. There’s critics.” 

Harry feels a shiver down his spine at these last words, scurrying through the maze of backstage with Tom at his side, his nerves alight. Zayn and Liam are here tonight, which would be pressure enough. He starts to get paranoid about the ecstasy and then reminds himself that getting paranoid is exactly what will ruin him, so he turns his attention to something else. The character. The stage.

They arrive in the wings and slip in with all the others, mingling in their black and white outfits, sweat condensing in the atmosphere. 

“Ready, Harry?” Sean grins, clapping him on the shoulder. It’s unusual behaviour for Sean - the final night is always different.

“Yeah, man. Yeah. Enjoy it,” Harry replies. He smiles big as everyone around him exchanges words, hands, mouths. The audience is buzzing with conversation. 

Then the lights die down, and the hush spreads from row to row. 

“Go on,” they all whisper, and Harry turns himself inside out, turns his hands into someone else’s hands, turns into Jim. 

“_Do you remember fifteen?_”

Ecstasy lights up his insides. He feels as though he can see tiny stars in the heady spotlight. 

“_He’s using poetry like a ladder to climb out of some terrible place._"

He loves Tom so much for what he’s given him; he feels like he’s performing to Gods.

“_The only way I know anything about what I am is what I see in other people’s eyes._”

Harry doesn’t want it to end, ever. He is performing to angler fish with their lantern antennae. He is raw, egocentric, exploding. He writhes for attention. He’s abrasive. 

“_Do you remember fifteen?_” 

Applause batters his skull. Harry laughs, and holds hands with all of his friends. It’s bright and endless. 

-

Harry is sitting in the dressing room with his skin on fire. Coming down alone is fucking insanity, but he thinks if he’s around all those people any longer he’ll just stay high for the rest of his life. 

He bounces his leg up and down on the wooden floor. There’s makeup and clothes over all the surfaces, bags, dying plants, scrawled on scripts. By tomorrow night it’ll all be gone. 

As his gaze skips from object to object, his eyes burning, he lands on something he hadn’t noticed. It glints reflective, and it’s sitting on top of a pile of paper in front of the mirror, inconspicuous. Standing up from his seat, Harry walks over to the desk and touches his hand to it. It’s cool against his skin. With one finger he traces up and down the shape - a long stem, blooming into the bud of a rose. Glass petals fold over one another, natural as rainfall. It’s not entirely refined, but it’s clumsiness seeds something sweet in the pit of Harry’s stomach. 

There’s little, rounded thorns on the stem, which he presses his thumbs into. It grounds him. He imagines his own feet rooted to the ground, growing down past the floorboards and foundations and into the earth’s fresh soil. The dressing room is cold and his skin buzzes with it. 

He knows Louis can’t have done it, can’t have magically known he was here and found his dressing room and slipped away, but it still feels like a sign. Like the universe is telling him something.

That thought makes him feel vaguely sick. If it weren’t for the fact that he was high, maybe he wouldn’t be extrapolating this situation, or having visions.

“I have a headache,” he murmurs, slurring the words, standing with his head bent and the rose sitting light in his fingers.

“Unfortunate.”

Harry jumps, turning to the sound of the voice, his heart pounding at his chest. 

Liam is leaning against the doorway. 

“Oh. Hello,” Harry says. His words slide out of his mouth like slime, clumsy and slow. “Fancy seeing you here.” 

“What are you doing alone in the back?” Liam asks, softly. 

“I’m just chilling.” 

“Oh, Christ. Something’s up with you, isn’t it?” Liam comes into the room and touches Harry’s elbow, looking down at what he’s holding. He smells like sandalwood cologne. “Hm. That’s pretty.” 

“Yeah, it is,” he says, and his voice breaks.

“Well, whatever it is, we’re leaving,” Liam announces, looking around for Harry’s jacket and finding it folded over the chair. He slings it over his forearm and presses a hand to Harry’s back, which is slightly sweaty from lights, leading him tenderly out of the dressing room and into the better lit hall.

“Where’s Zayn?” Harry asks, digging his knuckle into his eye and holding the rose in one hand. He’s very stressed about dropping it, but he doesn’t want to hold it too tightly in case it snaps. 

“He was with the others. We were waiting for you to come out, to celebrate, but you didn’t.”

“I’m sorry.” 

They walk down the corridor in silence. Harry hears the buzz of conversation coming from the main hall, but they bypass it, heading towards the backstage entrance. Zayn is waiting by the with his hands in his jacket pockets and a frown on his face.

“Oi, mental. Where’ve you been?” 

“Don’t be mean, he’s tripping,” Liam says, pushing him lightly in Zayn’s direction. 

“I’m not,” Harry frowns, knocking elbows with Zayn. “Get off me.” 

“Of course you are. Fucking actors, I said,” Zayn sighs. He takes hold of Harry’s hand and opens them door, leading him out into the night.

“Fucking hell, it’s cold,” Harry breathes, gripping his rose and curling an arm around his stomach. His eyes prick with tears again, but this time it’s not his fault. He lets Liam put his jacket on as they walk, bracing against the temperature. The night is black and the stars are invisible, masked by pollution, leaving the sky empty. It reminds him of the deepest depths of the sea, settled too far down for sunlight to penetrate. Street lamps give them pools of orange light, like the bioluminescence of deep down creatures. “Very, very cold.” He can’t lift his head and so he just watches his shoes on the pavement.

Zayn and Liam take Harry back to their own apartment. They share a mattress so Harry can take Liam’s, which smells like that same cologne, and is cleaner than seems possible. He buries his face in the pillow. The rose is set down carefully in the gap between bed and wall, and it seems to radiate. It’s all Harry can think about as he drifts to sleep, carried on a wave, down into the depths of night and a comedown.

He dreams he’s back onstage, except all the audience are anemones and they don’t respond to anything he does. It’s dead silent. They are faceless, emotionless, still. He can see them all in minute detail despite the lights shining on the stage. Harry tries to talk, but he’s underwater and his words come out in the form of bubbles, drifting towards the surface. When they pop, it’s with the intensity of a balloon. They are all waiting for him, but he can’t do anything. He can’t move. He can’t breathe. His vision fades and he sleeps like a dog. 

-

Harry doesn’t have any roles after Prodigal Son finishes and he starts working at the restaurant again. He wears all black and serves tables with numerous other flailing actors and artists. There’s a lot of intergroup drama, which makes him feel like he’s back at high school, although New York City is notably less ostracising than Michigan. 

He finds himself thinking about Michigan a lot as he’s working; about the Porcupine Mountains and the great lake and the snow on the streets. His mum is there now, maybe hanging washing on the line or making stew or calling her sister. His bedroom will have been turned into a spare room or office, pictures of ocean floors and David Bowie removed. 

He hates that he still feels so guilty for leaving. Sometimes he wanted to tell William about Michigan, to talk to someone about it, but he knew that William wouldn’t say anything. He carried enough of his own guilt to wreck his insides, to make himself sick to the point that sometimes he couldn’t look at Harry. This wasn’t something William had ever said. It was just written in everything he did. 

It’s noon on a Tuesday, so it’s quiet, and Harry’s clearing glasses from a table and thinking about William and the sea. He’s so entrenched in his own thoughts that he thinks it’s his imagination when he looks up to see Louis, walking from the bathroom at the back of the restaurant, dressed in a black sweater and free of eyeliner. But then the vision makes eye contact with Harry, and blinks, and he is definitely real. 

Louis glances towards the front of the restaurant before making his way over, a slow smile forming on his face.

“Jesus, you’re everywhere,” he says, leaning one hand on the table Harry’s cleaning. “Are you a stalker, or a ghost?”

Crisp autumn air has their cheeks turning pink. 

“You’re the one at my work,” Harry replies, slowly. “And you turned up at my house. Reckon you’re the stalker.”

He bends his head and messes about with the plates, finding something for his hands to do. It’s weird to see Louis in a normal setting, at a normal time, in daylight. He’s not lit by streetlights or sunrise. 

“That’s fair, actually. I’ll give you that.” Louis looks towards the restaurant windows again, biting his lip. “I went to the library and took out books on the sea.”

Harry looks up, his stomach flipping.

“Not a lot on Venus’ flower baskets, so I’ll give you points for originality. But, yeah. Cool shit. Been inspiring my sculptures.” Louis touches the back of Harry’s arm, just by his elbow. “I’ll have to pay you credit.” 

His eyes are very blue. Long eyelashes. The way he’s smiling is giving Harry butterflies.

“You don’t have to do that,” Harry grins, and his voice sounds too low to his own ears. “Just as long as I get to see what you’ve made.”

“Course. Have to come over, yeah?” Louis flashes yet another look outside, antsy. “Listen, I’m sitting with my brother outside,” he says, and something about the way he says it seems meaningful, “so I’d better go. But I live on the Bowery, number eight. My apartment’s number thirteen. Come over on Friday. Yeah?” 

Harry nods, feeling mute. 

“Cool. Have a good day at work.”

And then Louis’ leaving and Harry’s boss is giving him a talking to and everything feels silvery. 

-

When Harry was ten, he and his mother had taken the long train ride into the city to buy two tickets for the aquarium. Reverence, akin to nothing he’d felt before, consumed him as he watched fins and tails and slippery bodies slide through deep green underwater. He pressed his hands against the glass and stared into the eyes of sharks. The aquarium formed a tunnel around the walkway and he looked toward the ceiling, seeing orange-bellied fish creep above his head. Seahorses that shimmered in the dark with luminescent colour, baby octopi the size of his head, fish all shades of yellow and green. 

Everyday after that, the aquarium permeated his thoughts. Water seeped in through his brain and altered his vision, his perspective. He spent hours in the bath, head underwater, timing how long he could hold his breath. He won a goldfish at the local fair and clutched it’s plastic bag tight all the way home, only for his parents to flush it down the toilet, claiming there was no space. 

He longed to live near the sea. At the swimming pool he dove and dove until his skin was pruned. Each year, his birthday present was a trip into the city and hours of conversation with the fish and the rocks and the sea weeds. He scraped together pocket money for books on sea life and diving. All he longed for was that religious feeling, the feeling of a silent cathedral and church stained glass, an experience like no other. Storms became something more to him - some nights, he prayed for so much rain he’d float away in the flood and sink down to the ocean floor. 

Walking into Louis’ apartment feels like walking into the aquarium for the first time. 

A whole wall of wooden shelving is decorated in blues and greens and whites, glass bent and melted and caressed into intricate shapes, geometric wonders. They become natural in front of Harry’s very eyes, as though Louis has taken the sand and salt in the glass and turned it back into something earthly, something alive and breathing. The seahorses and siphonophores of his dreams are writhing in front of him and they are beautiful. 

Red evening light touches the apartment gold, and Harry floats towards the shelves, reaching out a finger to touch, gently, a spiral of curling green. 

“You make these from beer bottles?” he breathes, nervous that the exhale might shatter something. Their fragility is heart wrenching. 

“Not just bottles. Anything glass,” Louis murmurs, clicking the door shut behind him. Outside, on Louis’ apartment steps, men had curled into ragged winter coats, clutching needles and cigarette lighters. They’re only metres away now but it feels as though they’re somewhere else entirely. A murky underwater scene. 

The stained glass in Harry’s childhood church had attracted him far more than the preacher ever had. His mum, prodding him to concentrate, while his boy-head dreamed of a room with four window pane walls, light filtering in blue and green and bleary. And now here was this in front of him. The blue-green glass of his childhood twisted into something far more beautiful than he at ten could ever conceive of. 

“This is incredible,” he murmurs, Harry-slow.

It feels so important for him to explain his feelings, but he can’t. Instead they sit on a shelf in Louis’ apartment, twisted up and shiny, blue organs. 

There’s no reply to Harry’s sentence and he turns, sees Louis leaning against the kitchen counter and watching him, gaze unreadable. 

Harry had felt sick with nerves in the lead up to arriving at Louis’. He hadn’t known what to wear or what he was doing. He hadn’t told Liam or Zayn and he didn’t know how he ever would, because everything about Louis felt private and his own. If he told anyone, it would crumble, like when he tried to tell someone about some stupid artistic venture of his. For most of the week since they’d met in the restaurant he’d either worked or read books, floating along in worlds that weren’t his. 

Louis’ apartment is tiny and freezing, parts of the wall falling apart and light bulbs flickering. The bed is small, tucked under the window, and most of one wall is taken up by a long desk. Scrap glass and melted shapes are discarded all over and on the floor beneath it. They sit alongside numerous tools that Harry has no name for. 

There’s one door Harry assumes leads to the bathroom, a studio flat with kitchen and bed all in the same space. Coffee cups cover the kitchen counter. Harry has the strange urge to see what’s inside the fridge, but instead he stays in front of the shelf, unsure what to do with himself. The nerves that had a hold on him just minutes before have dissipated, and now he just feels slow. His gaze drags over Louis’ records by the side of his bed - The Clash, Patti Smith, Sex Pistols. 

“Explains the eyeliner,” he murmurs, kneeling down to smooth his hands over the plastic covers, turning them over to read the backs.

There’s the sound of that silver lighter as Louis lights another cigarette. 

“Not a fan?” 

“Nah, I like it. Everyone likes The Clash, yeah?” Harry’s hands still as he comes across something grey. “The Cure. My favourite.”

Louis raises his eyes. “Wouldn’t have pegged you as the type.” 

“What did you imagine I’d be into, then?” Harry asks with his head bent, taking the record out of its sleeve, placing it carefully on Louis’ turntable and lowering the needle. 

“Hm, I don’t know. ABBA?” 

Harry scoffs, a smile on his face, rising to his feet. “I’m offended on behalf of ABBA.” 

The apartment is suddenly swimming in low guitar notes, Harry’s twitching imperceptibly as the drums start.

_I kneel and wait in silence, as one by one the people slip away_.

Louis walks over to his window and cracks it open. “Friday night and the lights are low,” he replies, sardonic as he smiles. New York’s city air filters inside, fresh in Harry’s lungs.

Louis’ back is clear beneath an off-white t-shirt, tucked into his pants with a heavy belt. Harry wants to keep staring for a long, long time, but then Louis turns around and a flush heats Harry’s neck and face, unbelievably warm. He isn’t sure if this is a moment he wants to preserve - he feels gooey and out of his depth, unsure of what he wants. It’s not something he’s used to. 

“I’m sorry for asking you here when we’re, like, new,” Louis says, slowly, one hand on the windowsill and the other on his cigarette. “Just something about you, I don’t know.” 

Harry stands still, holding a hand to his stomach. 

“Ever since the morning. Must be the Jagger mouth, yeah?” 

“The Jagger mouth?” Harry repeats, mouth twisting into a smile.

“Mhm. Big.” Louis raises his eyebrows.

Harry scoffs. “I can fit my whole fist in there,” he teases.

Harry knows Louis must be gay. There’s the brushing of skin, the lingering eye contact that says I know. However, that’s where it stops. There’s no performative checking out, and Harry can’t tell if Louis’ light teases are just his personality or if they’re indicative of something more. Harry himself, in his lip gloss and mesh and leopard print, is of unbelievable clarity. He attracts both desire and disgust. Louis, however, is giving him neither. 

“‘S that on your necklace?” Louis asks, nodding toward Harry’s chest. 

Harry looks down at the leather strap, the whiteness of the charm. “Real shark tooth,” he replies, quiet. “From an aquarium.” His legs are jelly and he finally sits himself on Louis’ bed, leaning back against the wall with his legs all folded. 

“Ah. Of course.” Louis remains standing at the foot, leaning against the wall right where it cuts away into open window. Glass smashes out on the street, and throughout the rest of the apartment complex Harry can hear the distant sounds of fights, music, creaking floors. Mostly, it’s drowned out by Louis’ record player. “What are you doing in New York, then? Hardly the hub of marine biology.” 

_The innocence of sleeping children, dressed in white and slowly dreaming, stops all time_. 

“I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s what I want to do.”

“What do you want to do, then?” 

Louis looks beautiful in the sunset light, and Harry stares at his mouth and jaw and everything about him, everything male and not allowed. Something about him is untouchable in a way that Harry hasn’t felt in a long time, in high school locker rooms or childhood sleepovers. The posters of David Bowie on his wall. Harry has come to terms with himself entirely, he is open about his sex life with himself and with his friends, and he presents flamboyant. 

The thing is, he has never had a long term emotional relationship with a man. His heart aches for something real, something beyond sex. William gave him physicality and he realised, slowly, that it wasn’t enough.

“I don’t know,” Harry breathes, after a very long time. “Do a lot of things right now.”

“You act,” Louis says, and Harry frowns.

“How do you know that?”

“My friend dragged me along to a play.” Louis blows smoke in Harry’s direction, purposefully. “Didn’t expect to see you there. Leading it.” 

Harry feels himself flush red and he feels like he’s been exposed to Louis in ways unknown. 

“Jesus.” 

He doesn’t say anything else and Louis stops, watching him, smiling. He feels like a kid under Louis’ gaze, like he doesn’t know anything.

There’s a long pause.

“Like the red string of fate, yeah?” Louis says, after a time of traffic and Robert Smith. 

“Hm?”

“The gods have tied an invisible red cord around our fingers. One that is attached, so we must be pulled closer. We are destined to meet. To help each other.”

Harry raises his eyebrows. “Seems we both like myths and legends.” His heart feels weighed down and sticky. He’s thinking about the glass rose in his dressing room. 

“Romance is nice in theory.”

“Not in practice?”

Louis shrugs, leans out of the window with his hands on the sill, cigarette burning between two fingers.

“I wouldn’t know, really. I don’t know.”

A thought comes to Harry’s head, hazey and wriggling, a fish in muck. 

“My dad cheated on my mother,” he announces, leaning his head back against Louis’ brick wall. “He left her a few years later. I hated him, and then I left her too. As soon as I was old enough.”

Louis is quiet. “Where did you grow up?”

“Michigan,” Harry smiles. “The Great Lake state.” 

“That’s crazy, man. I grew up right here. Lower East Side.” Louis throws his cigarette out of the window and comes to the bed, sitting down on the foot of it. His hand sits close to Harry’s ankle. “Is it beautiful, out there?”

Harry thinks about the green and blue and grey of his childhood. Thick snow and heavy fog, mists of condensation, breathing in cold winds. In the summer, vast and heady sunsets, sending pink and orange veils over the state. Trees and small mountains grew up from nothing, and there was always the lake, shimmering bright under a big white sun. 

“Yeah. Very beautiful. I think about it all the time.” 

“Sometimes I hate New York.”

Harry turns his head towards Louis. “New York is amazing,” he responds, quietly.

“You think that because you’re not from here,” Louis says, shaking his head. His arms are golden and slightly muscled. The fading light casts shadows on his skin.

“They hated me in Michigan.” 

Louis sighs. “Yeah, okay. It’s freer. I know.” Pause. “Doesn’t mean that it wasn’t shit to grow up here, man. My parents were junkies and we had no money. I was babysat by kids, and adults with fucking brain damage, like, from all the drugs. I grew up like a little urchin.” 

He doesn’t sound angry. Harry says sorry anyway, his fingers bent in the sheets. His family wasn’t rich, but they weren’t poor, not like some people in Michigan were, living in trailers or wearing clothes five sizes too big. 

“Did you come here to be an _artist_, then? Act on broadway. All of that.”

“I dunno. Partly. Mostly I heard my mum talking about my cousin,” he says, fighting his own blush. “He came here ‘to be a fag’, apparently. Dress up like a woman and that. Fifteen year old me thought that sounded alright.” 

Louis laughs, and it relieves Harry, makes him relax into the wall. Makes him smile too. 

“C’mon, I’d love to see you in a dress.”

“Maybe not quite there yet.” 

The sky is becoming dark and all Louis’ sculptures are lit by moonbeams. In Harry’s head, thoughts of William mingle with Louis’ glass objects, twisting the man into a blown blue shape. His flesh and bone become one and the same. A jellyfish and internal organs look so similar, and Harry sees bodies underwater. 

_I never thought that I would find myself in bed amongst the stones. The columns are all men begging to crush me._

“You haven’t shown me the sculptures I inspired,” Harry realises suddenly, biting on his bottom lip.

Louis raises his eyebrows. “Come to terms with taking full credit now, I see,” he replies.

“Course. Was only being humble before.”

“Hm, well. Not a lot to see,” Louis says, getting up from the bed and moving over to his desk. He opens a wooden drawer and reveals a myriad of white, blue, green, brown. Louis flicks on his light switch and they glint yellow. With careful, deliberate movements, he takes out a series of shapes so fluid they appear in motion.

Harry stands up from the bed and comes over to stand by Louis, touching his fingers to the cool glass. It’s so smooth it feels like touching water. 

Louis shows him curled weeds, octopus legs, tiny, delicate fronds. Glass coils into the loose shape of a pregnant octopus, transparent and light. 

“Here’s your flower basket,” he says softly, lifting something white and small from the drawer. “It’s nowhere near finished. They’re fucking intricate. It’s unbelievable.”

Harry picks it up, runs his fingers over the lines and holes, the light webbing of glass, so thin and layered he’s terrified it might break. He sets it down and rests a hand on his stomach, butterflies gone crazy. He feels almost sick with feeling.

“I liked seeing you in the play,” Louis says. His voice is low and he’s not looking at Harry. It seems like he regrets saying it, for a moment, as he rubs at the bone of his wrist. “Um. Do you, like. Wanna drink something?”

Harry shakes his head and feels his curls move on his forehead and neck. “I don’t think so.” Something in him feels urgent. 

It starts raining outside and Louis moves like he’s going to shut the window, but Harry catches onto his wrist and holds it there, and suddenly they’re standing very still, statues in Louis’ apartment, in the gloom, all his translucent beings twisting around them, their gazes locked together. 

“Hey,” Harry murmurs. His hand tightens on Louis’ wrist slightly, his fingers pressing into his forearm. It’s the most they’ve ever touched. The moon is unbelievably big. Harry feels his fingertips fizz with the tantalising idea of breaking through.

But he doesn’t.

-

Harry spends the following days in a daze. He waits tables and practices monologues in his head, pouring out wine while the sky turns duck egg blue and wind buffets the windows. Glass appears to him in a different light - each bottle and stem is an opportunity for curve and shape, a seahorse belly or shell. He dreams about a small cabin and a dark sea, an abandoned rowboat. He’s been writing, smearing ink all over the pages of his book, writing about blue and green. His fantasies of diving have been vividly reawakened. 

With the lights off and a single candle burning, he submerges himself in water and holds his breath, waiting for his head to pulse and darken, waiting until the last painful second. His vision fuzzes in the low light of his apartment, mimicking the fuzz of blue television static. The cars outside become circling sharks, anglers with dangling headlights, scuttling crabs along the seabed. 

He carts his clothes to the laundromat and slips in quarters, sitting in the artificial light, watching them tumble. Fabric softener and strange fake plants. 

The night he went over, he and Louis had made dinner together, leaving behind the intensity from before. Harry had laughed like he was a kid.

Before leaving, he left both his and Zayn’s addresses on a scrap of paper, but Louis hasn’t tried.

On an especially windy evening, Harry goes to Zayn and Liam’s. Zayn paints the wall, great sweeping motions of black and orange that drip down the plaster. At first, Liam frets about the landlord, but Harry passes him a joint and he caves. They burn tens of long candles along the kitchen counter and wear woolen sweaters while rain pelts down against the brick exterior of the building. Some of the neighbours, girls with black skirts and leather bracelets, come over with a bottle of whiskey, and they all drink to warm their blood, watching Zayn twist shapes along the wall and spray paint the toilet silver. Harry sits and threads a strip of leather through several dice charms, the weed settling his bones and focusing his intentions. He murmurs Louis’ name under his breath and tries to think if he’s ever felt so easily infatuated. The idea of kissing him sits, tingling against his mouth, the sweetness of it. No one seems as appealing to him as they once did. Liam puts his head in his lap and starts braiding his hair, and the feeling is so familiar and gentle that he starts to fall asleep. 

“I miss the Michigan woods,” he murmurs into Liam’s leg, and then starts shaking his head - “you’re ruining the braid,” Liam slurs above him - “I’m in love with them. I want to be climbing over fallen trees. I want to be outside.” 

“Outside in this rain?”

“Outside of the city.” 

Liam pats Harry’s cheek, leaves his hand there. “You’ve smoked too much.”

“Never.” Harry lets his eyes half close and watches Zayn paint right onto a girl’s shirt. The fabric is black cotton turning red. “I wanna go to the aquarium. Right now.”

“Don’t - hang on.” Liam pauses. “Is someone knocking?”

Harry isn’t aware of much as Liam moves his head gently to the floor, the cool of the floorboards welcome to his warm cheek. There’s Liam getting up and the sound of his footsteps, gentle, fading away into the mix of music and conversation. Smoke winds its way towards the windows, where wind still sneaks through the drafts.

Liam talks to whoever’s at the door, and Harry just makes out words - _didn’t realise_, _no, no_, _c’mon, come in_, _he didn’t mention you_, _I’m sorry_. 

Harry is lying on his side on the floor with his sweater up around his midriff and his fly unbuttoned, sinking into the wood, staring at the cold black outside and the movements of his friends, when Liam leads Louis into the apartment. 

“Oh, Jesus,” Harry murmurs, seeing Louis’ figure in the corner of his eye and lurching into a sitting position. “Are you an apparition?” 

“Indeed I am,” Louis replies, looking a little unsure of himself but smiling, eyes crinkling. Harry’s head swims as Louis sits down in front of him, raising his eyebrows. Liam is standing uncomfortably nearby as if a parent in new territory, clearly wishing he was more involved. He seems to make a snap decision and turns, going into the kitchen, collecting beer for the others. “You weren’t home, so I came here.” 

“Oh.” 

“Hope ‘s alright.” 

“No one else even noticed you arrive,” Harry smiles, glancing at Zayn and the girls. “Nothing to worry about.” 

“Yeah. You look properly fucked.” 

Harry feels himself flush with colour, and he rubs at his eyes, dopey. “Not that bad,” he argues.

“It’s sweet.” Louis is wearing a black hoodie and brown cords, his hair wet from the rain, hands white with cold. There’s water on his eyelashes. His converse are breaking apart at the soles. 

“D’you want any?” 

Louis grins. 

Minutes later, Harry is very poorly attempting to roll a joint on the wooden floor, and Louis won’t stop laughing at him. “I don’t need help,” Harry insists, his fingers feeling like robotic digits as he tries to force them to work. Eventually, Louis knocks his hands out of the way and takes care of it himself in seconds, a laugh working its way out of his chest. 

“Bit embarrassing, mate,” he teases, taking Harry’s lighter from him. 

“Fuck off,” Harry groans, kicking his leg out against Louis’ shin. 

He is drawn to the way Louis’ wrists look as he lights the joint, his hands, the movement of his veins. His fingers are careful and deft; trained by shaping glass and avoiding the sharp edges. Sluggish with weed, it’s hard for Harry to control his face, and he feels it go slack as he focuses on watching Louis smoke. Thin trails of white leaving his mouth. Louis sees him watching and starts playing to it, blowing out little rings from his mouth. To his left, the girls erupt into laughter, but Harry barely notices.

“Show off,” he smiles, reaching out to poke the smoke ring with his finger. 

“That’s me.” 

Louis looks around the apartment while Harry looks at Louis, his eyes lingering on the numerous canvases, the absolute mess of the walls that Zayn’s just made. “Any of these yours, hm?”

“No. No. Zayn is the artist,” Harry slurs. “If I paint, ‘s at my own place, and it is not good.” 

“Would love to see some shit art from you. Very refreshing, to see shit stuff.” 

“We should go to the gallery and look at shit stuff together,” Harry announces, breathing in Louis’ secondhand smoke.

“Fun idea, Curly.” 

Harry’s cheeks go all warm and his stomach really does fill with butterflies, the blue and purple kind, with soft and fluttering wings. 

“I have an even more fun idea.” 

“Hm?” Louis’ body is relaxing and his eyes are pink. Harry feels his nerves, all fired up, his chest heavy. He feels excited.

“Lets go to the aquarium. Open late on Fridays. Now.” 

Louis takes a long drag and makes eye contact with Harry for a long time. “Now, like right now?” 

Harry gives a little nod.

“Fucking freezing out there,” Louis points out. “Just walked for miles, for you.” 

For you.

“It’s not far from here,” Harry smiles. “Have you been?”

“Haven’t. Never really thought about it.” 

“Perfect.” 

Harry gets to his feet, tripping a little, getting caught on himself. He zips up his jeans and finds the nearest sweater, which is Liam’s, and cream. He feels Louis eyes on him, but it’s likely his own paranoia, or arrogance. Zayn is talking to Olivia when Harry bends down to murmur in his ear, explaining where they’re going, saying he’s got a key. He gives him a kiss on the cheek and breathes in the mixture of paint, weed, and cologne, a nice smell. It encourages him to give Olivia a kiss too; she smiles and touches his ankle.

“Come on,” he says to Louis, who’s putting the joint out on the floor. They put their jackets on at the same time, standing by the door amongst numerous pairs of shoes. Olivia’s friend brought over a punk record and it’s attacking Harry’s heart rate, which can’t decide if it wants to be quick or slow. Thick and slow. Like his heart is pumping honey. 

“Better be impressive,” Louis says as Harry opens the door. His rings clang against the doorhandle. A cold wind hits their bodies, and they scurry out fast, trying to keep the heat inside Zayn’s apartment. 

“It is,” Harry chokes out, slamming the door shut behind them and locking it. “And I know you know that.”

It’s dark outside, black, and their shoes are loud on the concrete steps. Yellow streetlights form pools on the ground and attract swarms of bugs, little communities clinging to heat and light. Harry’s head feels full of cotton. Bright green, pink, blue graffiti fights Louis for his attention. He imagines an angler fish sliding out from behind a wall, it’s gaping maw and massive teeth, the lantern on its huge head. He’s not often out at night when he’s high, and the feeling is murky - like being underwater. 

Louis talks quietly to Harry as they walk, his voice low. He tells him about a photography exhibition he and his friend Niall sneaked into; black and white film recreations of childrens’ nightmares. 

Harry thinks about his own childhood nightmares; standing in a white dress in the doorway of his house; trapped in a pothole surrounded by black dogs; a hooded person with long fingers; drowning in sand; a creature with freakishly long arms. He tells Louis about them.

“You could write plays about those,” Louis says. Both of them have their hands in their pockets, and Harry imagines holding Louis’, their hands and knuckles cold in the winter air. They pass a lot of people laughing and drinking on the street. Harry wonders which of them would care.

They arrive at the aquarium. It’s lit up blue from the inside, glowing bright in November. They walk into what seems like another world; light and artificial. Harry and Louis are the only people at the reception.

They pay for two tickets from a tired looking woman and then Harry takes Louis by the wrist. The first door opens into a long tunnel; they look eerie and pallid under neon green light. “It’s the small stuff first,” Harry murmurs, sneaking a glance at the side of Louis’ face. He’s smiling. It quickens Harry’s heart. 

They enter the first room. 

Small tanks house little fish with big colours, huge crabs, starfish, circling the room and stacked in the middle of it. Harry presses against glass; the fish with frills so delicate they appear like lace, translucent white and silver, bright, pregnant seahorses glowing luminous. 

“That one looks like you,” Louis teases, pointing to an orange fish with a big lump on its head.

“Hey,” Harry complains, knocking his hip against Louis’. “Childish.” 

“Big head means it’s got a big brain.” Louis raises his eyebrows at Harry, trying to suppress his smile. 

“You are not saved.”

“I like the little black and white ones.”

“Hm. Keep talking about fish. That’ll make me melt.” 

“Oh, Harry, I love these little zebra looking shits,” Louis groans, spreading his hands across the glass. “They are absolutely intoxicating.”

“Alright, never mind,” Harry replies, fixing him with a look. He turns away from Louis, to another tank Small octopi stare back at him. “I wish these were my friends instead of you.”

“I’m your friend? Sweet, Harry.” He is still watching the little zebra fish.

“Shut up.” Harry counts the suckers on the octopus' limbs. He’s alone with Louis. He’s high. They’re in a room that’s dark and glowing and full of sea creatures. Maybe he is asleep on Zayn’s floor, and the smell of turpentine is giving him crazy dreams.

“We should keep going, I want to see sharks.”

Harry rolls his eyes, peeling away from the tank. “Childish,” he smiles. Louis’ hair is wet over his forehead, his skin blue and cold. In the lighting, he looks seraphic; strange and heavenly.

“You’re the one who took us here,” Louis retorts, and Harry cannot argue with that. He touches his hand to Louis’ hip, the wet fabric of his jacket, and nods to the connecting tunnel. Underwater shadows dance over the floor. 

They are swallowed into a waterless sea. Huge fish swim at eye height, fins slight and slippery. It’s all blue and green. Louis is quiet at his side, and they breathe the same silent air, inside a very lucid dream. 

Something swims out of the gloom. 

One slit of an eye and that great lump of open jaw - a shark, to greet them. 

Sharks have always unnerved Harry. As with everything in the sea, he has love for them, but they are sickening to behold. Something about the intensity of their expression. 

It glides alongside them now, one small eye tracking their movement. Other fish dart from rocks, plants, uneasy. It is king of the contained. 

Harry’s hand comes up to his throat, closing around the sharp, hard shark’s tooth. 

“I think it likes you,” Louis murmurs, coming up behind Harry and tugging on one of his belt loops. Adrenaline and proximity spikes Harry’s adrenaline. His veins are going crazy, his mouth fills with saliva. He feels so young.

“It likes my blood,” he replies. Louis leaves his two fingers curled in the loop. The shark is slowly retreating, bored by their stillness, its skin dulled by the low light. Other creatures come forth bravely, shimmering white and green. Smaller sharks and bigger fish dart in front of the glass, jellyfish clinging close to the floor. The shark swims over their heads to the other side of the tunnel.

Harry turns his head to the side. 

They kiss gently, like teenagers, and Louis slides his hand up under Harry’s t-shirt, warm against his hip. His stubble is rough on his skin. His tongue in his mouth. The feeling has his heart jack-rabbiting in his chest, embarrassingly hard and fast, while the rest of him moves slowly, like they’re inside the water. Rain comes down hard against the building and there is no one around them.

Louis pulls away a slight bit, their mouths wet. “Fuck,” he breathes. “I knew this would happen.”

Harry feels face flush, and he swallows. “Is this a bad thing?” he questions, quietly. He can feel Louis’ exhales on his own face.

“God knows,” Louis replies, and it seems literal.

“Okay.” Harry steps away, making Louis’ hand fall away from his hip. “We don’t have to.” _I want to_.

Louis is silent in response. The tunnel feels very encasing. Harry moves up to the glass, pressing two hands and his forehead against it. It’s unfair, he thinks, how things like this can never be easy for him. All his high school classmates falling into relationships like it couldn’t go any other way, while he had to sit and dream. He stared at the backs of heads of the boys in his class, they way they held their pencils. He understood, unlike other boys, the deep shame of a gym locker room, while he fought the excitement of seeing their legs in shorts. He didn’t make friends because his secret was too heavy. Even now, in New York, he doesn’t have _boyfriends_. They have sex and then it’s over, because he hasn’t learned how to do anything else.

He had William, and he left, and now he’s going to get to fuck it all up again with Louis. 

Very small fish brave the proximity of Harry’s face, flittering away after a moment. They have translucent fins and skittish behaviour. 

“Come on, Harry. I still wanna see the rest.” 

They move on, walking through linked tunnels and expanding rooms, surrounded by blue water. There is only one working attendant. 

They are the last visitors, wrapped in individual blue bubbles, a new barrier between the buzzing atoms of their bodies. 

They go home to separate buildings.

-

Harry watches a black fly struggle at the edge of Liam’s windowsill, spindly legs struggling to carry such a big body. Outside, the air is cold and thin, and the draft snakes in through all the cracks and holes in the building. He’s sitting on the ground and it seeps through him. The fly’s wings flutter in the current.

Winter sinks through Harry’s pale skin and into his bones. He remembers the smell of burning logs, seeing spirals of smoke rising from all the homes in the neighbourhood. All those sinking, heavy storms. 

Zayn has landed an exhibition. Liam helped him carry his paintings through the street, to set up on the location, but now he’s home with Harry while Zayn confirms with the curator. They’re both quiet. Harry has been quiet a lot, recently; he feels like he talks too much. 

When he’s with Louis, he just wants to talk forever and ever and say so many things. Sometimes he does. He lets it all fall out of him like talking is natural, like the words are being coaxed out of his mouth. 

But Louis doesn’t touch him. Whenever they’re together, they’re outside, somewhere they can be seen. It’s like Louis’ enforcing the barriers upon them, and Harry agonises over why. Down by the riverside, they sit and talk about SAMO, about smelting glass, about how angels look if they are real. Sometimes they’ll be out as the sun sets and they’ll watch it collapse upon Staten Island, spreading a thick orange haze over the harbour, the horizon, their eyes and their hair. 

“It feels like we’re watching the death of the sun,” Louis says one evening, the laces of his converse undone and dirty. His feet dangle down over concrete. 

His words and the colours of the dripping sky drench Harry in warmth. It’s a feeling unlike anything. The ocean spreads out like the entire world in front of them, shimmering, reflecting great industrial monoliths and the clumping of winter cloud. His insides are spilled out onto the ground beyond, buzzing and endlessly alive, red and orange and light. The way Louis talks, the things he says, his voice and his New York accent. Harry is just a tiny, tiny moth, tiny and pink, drawn to Louis' heady circle of light. And while the politics surrounding them are turbulent and fraught, Harry knows that if he held Louis’ hand, everything would feel very calm. Even for just a moment. 

“Harry?”

Harry jumps, knocking the fly with his hand as he turns to look at Liam. “Mhm. Sorry. Distracted.”

“As usual,” Liam replies, but he’s smiling. He’s leaning against the kitchen counter, dressed in a white t-shirt and jeans. The colour of his eyes is warm in the lowlight. 

There’s a sudden moment, where he shifts and looks Harry differently, like he can’t make eye contact.

“What were you saying, Li?” 

Liam clears his throat. “Zayn asked me to tell you something. It’s why I’m not, like, helping him down there, right now.” 

Harry feels his stomach fill with something cold. This always happens. Liam is the one who has to shoulder the giving of news, the mediator between the two of them. Zayn wants to talk about things right up until they get serious, until something happens that is real. Liam telling Harry something while they’re alone is a fucking terrifying sign.

“Okay. So, yeah. Go on.”

Liam crosses his arms, gripping onto his own elbows. “Do you know what happened to William?” 

There’s no point in lying.

“He left New York. To go back to his family.”

Liam shakes his head, looks up and out the window, away from Harry. The room is very cold.

“Harry, he.” A pause. “William got married. Mark told me, the other night, down at his.” 

Harry doesn’t respond. He sits, with his arm still slung over the windowsill, his shirt rubbing uncomfortably at the back of his neck, the feeble sounds of the fly summoning its last reserves of energy. A vivid memory overtakes his head; the smell of bugs burning up in their living room lamp. 

“To who.”

“A woman. I don’t know who she is. I don’t think William knew much about her, either.”

“Right.”

“He isn’t happy.”

“Okay, Liam.” Harry turns back towards the window, pressing his forehead to the freezing glass. “I don’t care.”

“Harry.”

“I don’t care. I don’t. He left me, yeah?” 

For a while, Liam doesn’t speak. 

They’ve known each other for a long time, and Harry is well accustomed to Liam’s parental ways of dealing with things, his careful considerations. Obviously, it’s kind, and he’s very good at talking to people, but sometimes Harry just doesn’t want anything. He doesn’t want to talk about things or discuss all the deeper layers. He wants to be a fly, with one simple goal. 

“You know he didn’t leave you because he didn’t like you,” Liam says, finally, each word measured, like he’s stepping out onto ice.

“Doesn’t matter. If he liked me enough he would’ve stayed. He could’ve.”

“Just because you left your home, Harry - not everyone can.” 

“I know.” Harry wants to squash the fly. He picks at the white peeling paint of the windowsill. “I’m not a fucking idiot.” 

“I don’t think he’ll be happy in that marriage. You know he won’t.”

Harry closes his eyes and breathes slowly. He thinks about his sister and her many boyfriends through high school. For her, love will come clearly, and it will be obvious. For him, he has struggled with looking at men since he was old enough to see. Talking to women was often even harder. 

“And what do you want me to do about it?” 

For once, Liam doesn’t have an answer prepared. Harry sits and thinks about a suit and a flowing white dress, his skin all hot and his eyes glassy, and he’s just about to say something scathing and unfair when Liam finally speaks. 

“I’m in love with Zayn.”

It’s such a quiet, gentle sentence. Everything feels very still. Even the fly is silent, its wings static, its little feet useless. Harry stares down at it and is quite sure that it’s dead. 

He turns around, slowly. Liam is standing with his shoulders straight and his jaw tense, staring hard at the wall in front of him, the wall Harry’s slumped against. All the pride he sees in Liam’s face when Zayn paints, the intensity of his gaze, the careful way he talks to him, and the simmering connection that’s never been addressed. 

Harry stands up and goes to Liam. He smells like saltwater and Zayn’s cigarettes. They hug, and Harry thinks about being a man, about the way he thinks about people, about the way he loves them. 

“Have you told him?” He speaks into Liam’s shoulder.

Liam shakes his head.

“Have you - “

“We’re not together.” 

“I know.” 

Liam pulls back, his face tight with worry. He drops his hands to his sides. “The way he talks about people,” he begins, that same, measured tone, “he talks about people like they’re all amazing. He sees amazing things in all of them. And. I’ve never heard him say those things, of me.” He breathes out, his hands curling into fists. 

“Liam, don’t do that to yourself,” Harry says, quietly. There’s a lump in his throat and he’s thinking about Louis. “He fucking lives with you. You’ve always been with him, you’re always together.”

“That doesn’t mean anything.”

“He thinks you’re amazing, Li. He’s painted you a hundred times. You don’t paint things you don't love.”

Ocean, seawater, millions of tiny fish, bubbles, blue. Blue.

“H, it’s okay. Not asking you to assure me.” 

Harry looks at Liam’s strong arms, his broad shoulders, his Adam’s apple. Calming, warm, brown, his endless waves of humour. He hopes that Zayn knows what he has.

“I want to. I want you to be happy.”

“I don’t know anyone who is,” Liam responds.

“Alright, Schopenhauer,” Harry laughs, reaching up to pat Liam on the cheek. “You know what I mean.” 

“I know, H, because I want it for you too.”

“William is his own man.”

“It’s more than just William. You know that,” Liam scolds. “William married a woman because he couldn’t live with being gay. I don’t want you to internalise that.”

Harry shakes his head, looks down. “Wasn’t with him,” he mutters.

Internalise that. Would be a bit late to worry about internalising anything. Twenty years old, running from a mother who condemned him and a radio that spouted a slew of hatred. Sexual liberation. Somehow, it doesn’t feel like enough. 

Cars rush by on the street outside. Harry wishes there was music playing, something to latch onto. He and Liam stand by the kitchen counter like petrified bugs. 

“You should go to Zayn. See how he’s doing,” Harry says, looking up to Liam’s face. Those thick brown eyebrows. 

“Nah, H, I’m with you,” Liam replies, but Harry keeps shaking his head.

“Go on. I have things to do anyway.”

Liam raises his eyebrow, but Harry doesn’t say a word. Keeps his smile small.

They exit the apartment into chilling air. Light and colour drops rapidly as the moon lifts higher in the air, the pale waning crescent of a November night. New York shifts around them. They’re absolutely nothing, ants in a grand forest, crawling about beneath trees thirty thousand times as big as their own bodies.

When they split paths, Harry sees Liam off with a kiss on the cheek, patting him on the back as he trots off down a side street. Alone, he tilts his head back and looks at the silvery Milky Way. 

In fact, he looks at a polluted black sky, but he squints and the smudging of his eyelashes against the cloud looks halfway there. Louis told him that he was born on Christmas Eve. That makes him a Capricorn.

Harry smiles at the idea of a creature half goat, half fish. Possibly the least practical formation ever imagined. He, himself, the water bearer - he could fill the ponds for Louis to swim in. The streams, the rivers, whole oceans. Looking up at the sky, he sees himself, clutching his vesicle close to his chest, and then Louis, the two of them circling in ridiculously massive glowing balls of gas, following each other across the infinite sky. 

Hm.

Harry’s feet carry him home. He opens the door and goes inside, affronted by the freezing emptiness. Without turning any light on, he finds the books on his table, and, clutching one to his chest, leaves as quickly as he entered. The lock clicks shut on his way out.

Fifteen minutes later, he’s knocking on Louis’ door. His rings hit on the wood far too loudly and he feels his own face flushing pink, suddenly shy, his stomach tied in knots. He hasn’t been to Louis’ place since the first time, where he looked at his delicate sculptures. He doesn’t even know if he’ll be home. He doesn’t even know if someone else will already be in there.

The door opens. 

“Oh,” Louis blinks, staring at Harry. He’s wearing a black t-shirt, his face soft and clean, his stubble dark. Then there’s a horrible, long moment, where Harry almost turns to leave, before Louis’ mouth turns up into a smile he can’t seem to keep down. He stands back, opening the door wider. “Charming surprise, Styles.”

The book weighs heavy in his arms. “Yeah. I hope it’s okay. You can kick me out.” 

“As if. Wouldn’t be able to handle the look on your face,” Louis teases, shutting the door behind them. 

The flat is smaller than Harry remembered and just as perfect. The sheets on the bed are dark and unmade, and the smell of cigarettes permeates the air. The shimmering of glass, on every surface, softens his heart. 

“I’m just fulfilling my promise to you, anyway,” he points out, handing the book over to Louis as he toes off his shoes. “Said I’d show you Venus’ flower baskets.”

Louis raises an eyebrow, looking down at the hardback in his hands. “Hm. Never could find any pictures of them at the library.”

“Exactly. And you need references.”

Louis rolls his eyes, carrying the book over the couch. He sits down with his legs crossed and sets it down on his lap, flipping through the first few pages. Harry, ever uncertain, follows obediently. Next to Louis, he feels unsure what to do with his legs, which are suddenly massively long. 

“Wow,” Louis murmurs, under his breath. He runs a finger over the plates in the book.

“I know. ‘s crazy. Crazier things than the basket, in there.”

“Show me,” Louis says, looking up into Harry’s eyes.

Blushing, Harry leans over and flicks to one of the pages near the end. It’s a double spread of black, black sea, with an orange creature so bright it seems to swim into the air around them. It’s a tangle of luminescent strands, a massive drape of tentacles linked by a glowing blue thread, and it looks entirely alien. 

He turns to the next page. It’s another, but an entirely different shape. Bright blue cones of burning light emerge from some white fuzz. Great coral colonies.

“What are these?” Louis murmurs, his fingers resting on the photo paper.

“Siphonophores. They’re hundreds of feet long,” Harry explains, his heart pounding in his chest. “They emit light to attract small fish, to eat them.” 

“Never even heard of them before.”

“No one knows about anything in the sea.”

“You do,” Louis says.

“Nah,” Harry replies, shaking his head, smiling. “I don’t. I couldn’t, there’s too much.” 

“Hard enough to understand what’s on land, yeah?”

Harry bites on his lip, thinking about Liam’s words. _I want it for you too._

“Yeah. Like, we’ve talked for ages,” he begins slowly, “and I barely understand you.”

Louis’ hand stills where he was turning a page of the book, and Harry feels something shift. A change in current. A cool patch of water.

“What do you mean?” 

Harry clears his throat, shifts. He looks down at his hands, which fold together in his lap. Gently, he strokes a thumb over his own knuckle, fixating on the white bone. Flushed red. 

“Harry,” Louis continues, his voice caught between concern and anger. 

Harry can feel all his bravado seeping out of him, but he catches what’s left, takes a long breath, and looks to Louis’ face.

“Why don’t you want to kiss me again?” It’s not what he meant to say, but it’s all he can think to articulate.

Louis breathes out hard, pushes the book away on the table. Even like this, unresponsive and tense, he makes Harry’s stomach do flips. 

“You sound like a child when you say that,” he replies, eventually.

That stills Harry, condescension coming over him in a wave. He crosses his arms over his stomach and just sits there, between Louis and his sculptures. Out in the hallway he can hear a group of people laughing.

“So, do you want me to just leave,” Harry says, and Louis throws his head back, huffing to the ceiling.

“Don’t fucking leave, Harry.” 

“I just - I don’t know what you want.” 

“Why can’t it just be easy? I like listening to you talk.”

“I’m not the one who made it hard,” Harry replies. 

Louis shakes his head, turns to look at the wall. Away from Harry. Light reflects off the shelf behind Harry’s head, off the glass, refracting in weird shapes on every surface. If he squints, he’s in a long white church, stranded in the middle of some southern desert, a scorched parish, and the glass is tinted blue and green and brown. Figures whisper to him. 

There’s a movement and Harry opens his eyes to see Louis standing up, moving to the kitchen fridge.

It lets out a square of solid blue light as it’s opened. There is almost nothing inside it. Harry has the strange sense of being in a convenience store late at night, with the artificial tube lights and coloured refrigerators. Words come to him, swimming out from the gloom and haze – 

_In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!_. 

Harry thinks about it while he watches Louis close the fridge door and turn instead for a bottle of red wine, already opened, the cap broken and the label peeling. _Are you my Angel?_ he thinks, over and over again, unable to escape the lines of the poem, unable to think for himself. He’s nervous he’ll say it out loud. 

Louis drinks straight from the bottle and then, carefully, comes around the counter to Harry, holding the bottle out and giving him a quiet look. 

Harry takes it by the neck. Their fingers touch and Harry’s rings clink against the glass. The wine is bitter but smooth on his tongue, and it makes him feel like he’s somewhere important, or maybe at a high school party with a fluttering crush. When Louis sits back down, the air becomes thick. 

“It’s stuff from when I was a child, I guess,” he says, avoiding Harry’s face.

“Isn’t everything,” Harry replies, quietly. 

“Yeah. I know.”

“What did you do, as a child,” Harry offers. He feels like he’s talking to a skittish horse.

“Was an altar boy. I used to wear this big white bow around my collar and light the incense.” Louis rubs at his face. “My father took photos of me. I remember sitting on the wooden stool, the flash burning my eyes.”

Harry bites his lip. “That happened around here? That kind of church, I mean.” 

“Nah. Bit further away. But I didn’t, like, lie about growing up poor. Once I was eight, my dad left, and that’s when we had to scrounge for everything, when we moved to the Lower East Side and left the church.” 

There is a pause.

“Before that, I was, like. This child of God. My mother’s angel. She held onto that, after we lost everything else. She just wanted me to be good. We had this big chalice that sat on the table, and she’d point to it, telling me that sinning was like drinking Satan’s blood. The chalice was always empty, so we couldn't be tempted.”

“Even when she turned to drugs, she pretended we were pure. She said she was taking the world’s poison so there’d be none left for me. I was heaven sent, and she couldn’t let anything ruin me, so she injected and swallowed and sacrificed herself for me. But, I mean, yeah. I was growing up in downtown New York. She couldn’t have swallowed half the sins against God if she’d tried. I turned fourteen, I skated and got stoned and stole things. Watched people get hurt. Turned on the kids smaller than me, sometimes. Every night I came home, I lay wracked with guilt. I thought of my mom and how much she said she’d done for me to keep me clean. I thought about her bruised forearms. I prayed and lit candles, apologised until I fell asleep.“ 

Louis looks at Harry, blinking slowly. The light is so still in the room. Harry is aware that something important is being said, and he’s never been more content to listen, Louis’ words forming images in his head. A little boy in Sunday best, a cross hanging from a chain, the thin frame of his mother. Louis has never strung together so many sentences before. 

“Then I was fifteen. Was smoking a joint, wandering, alone, escaping the freezing fucking apartment and my dying mother. I didn’t have a jacket on and I was shivering. Someone came up to me, an adult, and I just stared for a second. Realised later she was a drag queen, but at the time I didn’t know what that was and I was so taken aback by the, like, androgyny. The makeup. The idea of, like, a man looking like a woman. She offered me her jacket in exchange for a smoke and I agreed. ‘S the leather jacket I still have. It smelled like a girl’s perfume and cigarette smoke, then, and I remember the feeling in my stomach when I put it on. We finished the joint and she smiled at me, gave me a kiss on the forehead, and left. I went straight home. I thought about it all night.

“The next day I went back to where I’d been, walked around for hours, lingering on corners. I heard my mom’s voice in my head, but it was drowned out by this weird sense of awakening, like something I’d always known was being brought to my consciousness. Finally, when night was setting in, I was standing outside this building and saw a group of people across the road. They were wearing fur and glitter, men in heels, lesbians with shaved heads. There was a cloud of smoke around their heads lit up like a halo. I felt my heartbeat pick up, like I’d got stoned too fast, and when they went inside the bar I just fucking followed them. I knew what they were; my mum talked about fags, dykes, transsexuals. She hated them like she hated junkies, before she became one.

“I was young, but no one stopped me. It was heavy and loud in there. I saw men kissing, and it was like my fucking brain exploded. The sweet, sickening thrill of being in that place was crazy. Felt like Eve being taunted with the apple; my mother’s chalice filling fast with blood. People started talking to me and I just - just became enveloped. I found the queen that gave me her jacket and she took me in, introduced me to all her friends. Me being young; they liked teaching me things. They thought it was cute that I didn’t know.

“Yeah, but. I never touched men. I was fully involved in the gay culture but I still kept that disconnect, even if it was meaningless. In my head, I felt that if I didn’t do anything actually <_gay_, I was still okay. I wasn’t ruined. When boys flirted with me, I just pretended not to be interested, but at night, I never stopped thinking about it. I saw so many male bodies. So many different types of people. I’d walk around the street and I’d recognise people; they’d recognise me. I felt like a fallen angel. I felt like everyone could see how my wings had singed off.

“Then, when I was seventeen, my mom found out.”

Harry feels sick, thinks about his own family. Smashing of glass, the silence. He bites his knuckle and stays quiet.

“I was out with a group at night. We were standing down the side of our favourite bar, and. Just. My mom was the farthest thing from my mind. For the first time, I felt untouched by her obsessive fucking dogma, her Christian theories of purity. This guy named Tom, he was so gentle, he touched my arm and I let it happen, I kissed him. The first time I’d ever kissed a man. When I opened my eyes, I honest to god thought I must have been in a nightmare. Like, banished from my thoughts, my mom had manifested physically, in real life, some fucking sign sent from God. She appeared in the alley and she locked eyes with me, amongst all these men dressed in leather and heels and makeup and everything left my body. Heat, blood, life, everything.

“She was high off her head and just started screaming. I couldn’t believe the collision of these two worlds; it felt garish and perverse. I didn’t want my friends to see her almost as much as I didn’t want her to see my friends. I just took hold of her arm and started dragging her away, going anywhere, cold seeping through me. My friends didn’t follow. We were halfway home when she broke away, falling to her knees on the sidewalk, picking up a smashed bottle. She started - she started hurting herself. She said that if I kept sinning like that, she’d just never stop. And, so. I stopped. I stopped sinning. I dragged her home and promised her I’d never, ever communicate with those people again. I stayed home every night and smoked while she stumbled around the city or stayed in, trying to clean the apartment. I made us dinner and tried to encourage her sobriety, but she was too deep and I was too inexperienced, too overwhelmed with myself.

“I read verses and tried to write poetry. I glued shit together, random shit from around the apartment, sometimes used fucking needles. I didn’t want to go outside. I didn’t want to see anyone I used to know. Our only money came from my grandparent’s monthly envelopes, which I had to squirrel away before she could blow it all on smack. I thought of God and tried to repent and make things to distract myself, but I could only think of my leather jacket and the disco music I thought I’d just never hear again. The scars on her arm got infected, healed rough. She itched them when she got too antsy.

“For a year, everything went on like that. And then, a week before I turned eighteen, she just. She never fucking came home. I stayed up for two nights, feeling nothing, just waiting, but she never did. I left the apartment and found all the fucking homeless people she used to shoot up with, the people who came round to ours sometimes. They told me she’d overdosed by the river and died. I spent the rest of the day walking through New York in a daze. It was the furthest I’d walked since she found me by the club, and I just let my feet take me.

“It seemed that she’d been heading towards death for so long that I’d started to see her as immortal. That I’d be bound to her forever, her angel and her sacred child and her connection to Heaven. I thought about where she was now - Hell, Heaven, or nothing. If she could see me. She became my new, ever present, notion of God. For the first time I was truly alone in the world, but I felt more watched than ever.”

Louis stops, looking at Harry, again rubbing over his face. He seems to come back into the present day, fading out of his own words.

“Like. Yeah. So, anyway. After that, I got a job. Saved up and moved here, where the memories weren’t everywhere. I kept making shit and found glass blowing. I went out. But I’ve never, like. I’ve never gone back. Never gone back to a proper gay club. Never done anything with a man after that one kiss with Tom. I can’t help but think that it was the kiss that made God turn my mother down that alley. I stepped too far over the line, fell from Heaven down to Earth and then tried to dig through to Hell. I’ve never wanted to know what would happen if I tried that again.”

Harry raises his hand to his mouth, touches his lips. His heart is pounding out of his chest. “And now you’ve tried it again,” he realises, quietly.

Louis shakes his head, but there’s a small smile on his face, staring at the wall behind Harry’s head. 

“I know. Yeah. I know,” he sighs. “Something about you, like. You’re beautiful. Despite being gay, you have such a purity about you, and it’s fucking driving me crazy. My mother would call you depraved, but you’re so clearly not.”

Louis’ eyes start to water, and Harry feels a lump in his throat, the air gaining a thick veneer, clogging in his airways. He’s thinking of the past, boy-Louis in the streets, alone, thin wrists and dirty clothes. Joint in hand. Disconnected mother at home. Needles beneath the bed. 

The wine is all finished. 

“What she told you isn’t true just because she’s your mother,” Harry says finally, unsure how to respond to anything he’s just heard. It’s all. It’s all swimming in his brain, pink mush. 

“I know. I don’t even believe in God. I don’t want to. I just can’t help the fucking - the way it was drilled into me, you know. The fear.” 

“I know,” Harry nods, pinching his bottom lip between his finger and thumb. “It was like that at my school. Small town.”

Louis rests his head against the back of the couch, watching Harry.

“Have you had sex with men?” He asks, after a moment, his words carefully stressed. 

“Yeah.”

It’s quiet. “How do you not, like. Hate yourself for it?”

The lump in Harry’s throat is very present. He doesn’t know how to give proper help to Louis, not when he’s this young, just doing things because he feels them. He just escaped his home and forgot everything. 

“It’s not bad, Louis. It isn’t.” _It’s not about hating, it’s about loving, that’s the whole point._ Everything he wanted to make William realise. Frustration wells up inside him; he just wants to find the words that will make Louis understand, that will make it all click into place. “You were happier with those people you found than with anyone else, it sounds like.”

Louis is quiet, nods slightly. Harry is aware that he won’t be able to solve this in a moment, but he wishes he could. Deep in the back of his mind, he feels like he’s atoning for his failure with William, and although it isn’t fair to project that onto Louis, he can’t help it. 

The apartment is sickeningly quiet and the fire glows orange, crackling, spitting small flames and gilding everything in holy light. 

“C’mon,” Harry urges, softly. He touches Louis’ wrist, just two fingers, on the bone, the feeling of their skin buzzing and blurring together like the colours of a Rothko painting. “Let’s dance.”

“Right here?” Louis asks.

Harry doesn’t reply; unfolds his legs and stands up, goes to the record player. He kneels down in front of the box full of sleeves and flicks through them, like he did the last time he was here. He looks and looks, taking in Louis’ taste, searching for something bright. Vivid blue, electric pink.

The Cure is replaced by Donna Summer. Harry sets the needle down on the new record, placing it carefully, counting the grooves. He turns the volume dial higher.

The guitar riff, the proud piano; it pulls a grin out of him and he looks back over his shoulder at Louis, whose arm is splayed over the back of the couch, already loosened and languid. He shakes his head, laughing, and the smile finally reveals his face for what it is, clean and sweet and young. 

“You’re ridiculous,” Louis announces, and then Harry is in front of him, taking hold of his hands, pulling him to his feet. 

“Which is a good thing,” Harry announces, cheekily. 

Their hands remain clasped as they begin to dance, floppy, like three year olds that haven’t quite figured out how to move. Laughter spills out of them and their cheeks flush pink in the steadily warming room, jumping and grooving keeping them hot. Harry lets go of Louis’ hand, raises his arms above his head, twisting and letting his hair go wild around his face. Louis follows suit and his shirt raises up above his stomach; Harry sees golden, smooth skin, male stomach and hipbone, the light hair of his happy trail. Imagines how he smells when he’s warm and wearing nothing.

They sing while they dance and the orange room turns red with pleasure. Harry’s internal organs are twisted up inside and they become jellyfish in his mind, bright and twisting underwater, glowing bright, unable to think. 

-

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading... 
> 
> i am working on the second chapter. :-)


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